Bonus review: The Favourites

The final event of the figure skating season is taking place as this publishes. The best skaters in the world at the moment are in Boston in the US to compete for the world title. Today (Thursday) sees the Men’s short programme and the medals being decided in the Pairs, which is not to be confused with Ice Dance which is the subject of today’s bonus review – of Layne Fargo’s The Favourites. I started reading this with a plan to possibly write about it to coincide with the European Championships at the end of January – but then the American Eagle crash happened in Washington DC, which killed a number of skaters – including former world champions and aspiring juniors and I didn’t feel reading a fun skating novel for a few weeks. But it is really good, and it does deserve a mention here, so I’ve found a chance to do it after all.

Katarina Shaw wants to be an Olympic skater and when she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely teenager stuck in the foster care system, the two of them become an ice dancing partnership – and a real life partnership. They don’t have money, they don’t have the best equipment or the best coaches, but they’re determined to make it to the top and they do right until they don’t. The framing device for this book is that it’s the tenth anniversary of their final skate at the Olympics when it all fell apart – and there’s an unauthorised documentary being made about them. This means that you follow their story from their initial meeting all the way to the Olympic games, inter cut with interviews from other people who were there – their rivals, the judges, the journalists.

Now I watch a *lot* of figure skating, and although I’m not a skater, I know a fair amount about how the sport works and the politics of it all. And my experience of fiction featuring skating has been a bit mixed – but I couldn’t resist this because it was getting comparisons to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which as you know I really, really loved. So I took a chance. And it’s really good. Everything is turned up to eleven, but apart from all the (on ice) partner swapping, the skating details felt pretty flawless and Fargo has done a really good job of creating an alternative universe of the early 2000s Olympic cycles.

It’s also a real page turner, which doesn’t require you to know about figure skating to enjoy it – it will create the world for you. But if you are into skating, the areas of the sport where Fargo has taken liberties and made changes have been picked really well (and are often areas that fans of the sport complain about). And like another TJR novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, you can also have fun spotting which real life incidents and characters she has been inspired by when creating the storyline. I wouldn’t say that all the characters are tremendously deep or well developed, but there’s so much plot and it moves so fast that you don’t really notice until you’re looking back at the end.

My copy of The Favourites came from NetGalley, but it’s had a big, buzzy release and I’ve seen it in a whole load of bookshops over the last month and a half since it came out. And of course it’s on Kindle and Kobo too at a pretty good price (for a hardback release anyway) of £3.99.